Therapy for distancing ourselves from suffering: a proposal

Mindfulness-based therapies invite us to participate in an emotional paradox.

In the first consultation, I often visualize the people who come to therapy as being crushed by a giant stone..

This stone is unique to each patient, but they all have in common the brutal weight, the impossibility of letting go of it; sometimes the comic image of people being dragged down the mountainside by a snowball comes to mind.

And that is where the therapy begins: by beginning to put distance between the person and his or her suffering....

Mindfulness-based therapies: the paradox of Mindfulness

One of the axes that usually articulate the therapy has to do with acceptance: accept that suffering, or anxiety, or sadness, or recurring thoughts are going to be part of our lives, and begin to consider them as fellow travelers.and begin to consider them as fellow travelers. Only this makes things change. It is not resignation, it is not giving up, it is admitting these phenomena as they are.

I remember a special case, that of someone we will call M. She looked at me strangely when I proposed to befriend her depression, and later acknowledged that when she took this step and even "went for a walk with her", she realized that she no longer had so much power in her life.

It is also worth noting the case of J.A., who became an expert at greeting his intrusive thoughts that had to do with potential misfortunes that had to do with potential misfortunes lurking all around him. He was able to practice kindness with them, he would greet them, thank them for their visit and bid them a cordial farewell, and at that point they stopped ruining his day.

Y this is the paradox of acceptance-based therapies and MindfulnessThe more I accept my difficulty, the less power it has on me. And conversely: the more I seek to detach myself from my difficulty, the more it sticks to me and the more suffering it generates in me.

Let us think of M., a person overcome by her thoughts: she was perfectly aware of when thoughts took possession of her, but she could not stop them, they "crushed" her. Attempts to distract herself, to cover them up with medication had been unsuccessful, she was truly desperate.. The first step was to take a step back, to get out of the pot of thoughts in which she was macerating and begin to see the thoughts for what they are: mental events, not reality. Thus she was able to begin to recognize the thoughts, to distance herself from them, to not pay so much attention to them; she began to assume that "thoughts are not the facts" and there began a crucial liberation process in her life.

Or as it happened to S., who was living in such a state of activation and hyper-irritability that she was having problems in almost all areas of her life: in her family, at work, at bedtime, at mealtimes.... Introducing small pauses in her life in which she brought her attention to her body, emotions or breathing made those moments become handles from which to start a recovery work. from which to begin a work of recovery of moments of calm, small but increasingly frequent.

Suffering also occurs on a physical level. I remember with great affection N. whose stomach would flare up whenever she had any problems with her partner, and just paying attention to the physical sensations and allowing her stomach to express itself caused this feeling to loosen up and she was able to more easily approach her bodily sensations. As he paid attention to the body, the body became looser, he felt more and more in balance.She felt more and more in balance.